New spin on movies.
Local Ottawa writers Colin White (left), Sean Zio, Adam Thomlison, Jennifer Whiteford and Michael Reid joined together at the Raw Sugar Cafe on Jan. 8 to launch their screenplay anthology, "These Are Not Movies".
Emma Jackson
We’re all familiar with watching movies. But what about
reading them?
Little Italy resident and writer Adam Thomlison is proposing
just that for adventurous Ottawa readers, with the launch of a new anthology
called These Are Not Movies: Screenplays
for films that will never be made. The squat 300-plus page collection was
launched on Jan. 8 and includes eight original screenplays from writers around
Ottawa, including one from Thomlison, who is publishing the work through his
small book press, 40 Watt Spotlight.
Although the screenplays are written in film script format,
Thomlison said the screenplays are not meant to be made into real films – readers
should experience the film through words alone.
“I’m hoping to give people a chance to read this format and
see how great it is, because it doesn’t get any credit. Stage plays have for a
long time been treated as literature, and I think this deserves it too,”
Thomlison said. “One thing that’s enjoyable, this format allows the reader to
fill in the blanks themselves. You can cast yourself in the lead role, almost
always. You can impose your own memories on the scene.”
Thomlison fell in love with reading screenplays while on a
quest to figure out why he so loved the Lethal
Weapon films from the 1980s and ‘90s, which he admits are terrible movies.
“I wanted to find out what I enjoyed about them, and it
turned out it’s always the dialogue. The film’s writer, Shane Black, had
written a great movie, it was just done poorly,” he laughed. “So when I saw
that Shane Black had written another movie, I read the screenplay instead.”
From that point on he was hooked, and this anthology has
grown from that love of reading films.
“I knew I wanted this book to be a book of scripts that were
written with no intention of being filmed. But that was all the direction I
gave to the other writers: write a screenplay, but make it readable. It could
be anything from one scene to a feature film,” he said.
Centretown
writers Sean Zio, Colin White and Megan Butcher, Sandy Hill resident Jennifer
Whiteford, Nepeanite Michael Reid, Montreal resident and Mechanicsville expat
J.B. Staniforth, and Raouf Lefy all submitted a screenplay to the anthology
along with Thomlison.
What came together is a unique anthology with an
unintentional, but clear theme of loneliness running through its pages. Thomlison’s
screenplay, for example, starts with a lone guy on a bus staring at the ground,
whose strange story emerges through a shoe-filled dialogue with the girl
sitting next to him.
Whiteford’s screenplay is a one-character film featuring a
young girl obsessed with a Bachelorette-type reality TV show, who creates
weekly YouTube updates and analyses of her favourite show, divulging secrets
from her personal life at the same time.
“Simply through her YouTube show updates you start to get a
side story of her life, and the two intertwine. It’s really funny and it’s
really compelling,” Thomlison said.
The collection hit the book fair circuit in the fall –
arriving from the printer the night before it was due at the Ottawa small book press
fair – and has been in select local and independent stores for about a month,
Thomlison said.
On Saturday, Jan. 8, Thomlison gathered four of the book’s
authors at the Raw Sugar Cafe on Somerset West to officially launch the book.
The evening featured dramatic readings of the authors’ screenplays and a chance
to buy the book.
Thomlison said the book has sold about 100 copies so far,
not including the book launch, and he expects to break even soon.
The books are available at Invisible Cinema on Lisgar
Street, All Books on Rideau Street, Collected Works on Wellington West, and
Perfect Books on Elgin Street. They can also be purchased online at
www.40wattspotlight.com.