The Marksman

By Way of Introduction…

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. The writer creates the story, but everyone has to bring something to it — the writer alone does not make a movie unless he also happens to be producer, director, cast and crew.

Screenwriting Rule One: A script is a blueprint for illusion, and its every sentence must meet one of two criteria — it must be dialogue, or it must begin figuratively with the words “we see” or the words “we hear”.

If the camera can’t see it or the microphone can’t hear it, then it cannot be filmed, and therefore it doesn’t belong in the screenplay.

In preparing this story for publication in narrative form, I’ve eliminated the abbreviations and jargon that may make screenplays annoying or confusing. (How many readers can be expected to know that because of an obscure Hungarian director’s pronunciation in the 1930s, “MOS” means “Mit-Out Sound,” which is filmese for “without sound” or “silent”?) I’ve added bits and pieces in order to clarify events — a few lines or words here and there, in the effort to make it readable. But I have not tried to disguise its origins; it remains quite staccato. In movies people rarely talk in long paragraphs — everything’s a one-liner. It’s best to leave those essences alone.

I think most screenplays that are padded into novels turn out to be anemic novels at best; a movie script is a simplified form of storytelling because it is external — it cannot go inside a character and feel what that character feels, nor can it deal very effectively with ideas of any complexity.

This was not yet a shooting script; it was a second or perhaps third draft, and because of minor revisions it contained a few loose threads, unnecessary characters and incomplete thoughts. Those probably would have been caught by the writer on the next go-round, or by a director or producer, or at least by a script supervisor on the set. In the present situation, however, if the reader should chance upon an incongruity or mistake, please blame it not on the writer — never on the writer! — but on the Optical-Character-Recognition scanner that rendered the script into computer-editable form.

The Marksman is an action-suspense story, in which changes in the main character are triggered by violent events. It contains very short scenes and jump-cuts; I haven’t tried to smooth them over. It does not confine itself to the viewpoint of any single character in a scene, as narrative fiction ought to do. It makes leaps in logic, understanding that actors can bridge those by creating appropriate shifts in the ways their characters change their minds about one another and therefore change the ways they behave with one another. It asks the reader to become camera and microphone — to imagine and visualize the people and events that are depicted in blueprint form — and it provides plenty of leeway for the stunt wranglers and FX enthusiasts who have become the tail that wags the dog of commercial cinematic storytelling. All this may make more work for the reader; I hope it does not harm the story.

— Brian Garfield

Los Angeles: October 2002