Bucket List (Short Screenplay - 07/04/21 Draft)
19 pages. Drama. The Script.
A Brief Synopsis
An insecure young man toys with the idea of compiling and completing a list of things he feels everyone else seems to have done. When he bumps into a couple of old school friends, though, he starts to reconsider what to put on it.
The Background
I’ve been toying with the idea of this script amongst a bundle of others for a little while now and decided to finally sit down and write it. The idea was initially far higher concept and only a single plotline of a narrative. That script was a Sci-Fi drama (as most of my ideas seem to start out), with the sort of working title of ‘Terminus’, and was about a group of people living out their last year before the world was to be struck by some cataclysmic event, sure to erase all traces of the life we know.
That script was supposed to deal with maybe a more profound sense of living in the moment and how the average person might deal with the grief of receiving that news. The characters included a painter, dealing with a problem that they had always sort of known about but never really considered fully - this being that their work would be taken with them in the end. Another character was to be a newly pregnant woman grappling with whether or not to carry her baby to term. One character, who transformed into the main character of this short, was to be a man, recently diagnosed with a fatal disease, living out the life he had always dreamed of as those around him struggled to believe their time was also coming.
One night, a little while ago, I floated the idea of this probably-going-to-be-feature-length script with some friends of mine and it was sort of transformed. We’d been driving about, kind of talking about nothing, then decided to stop the car and go stargazing. We sat there in the corner of the field and I ran them - my captive audience - through what I was thinking. I told them about the characters I’d dreamt up and the whole scenario and they seemed pretty unenthused until I mentioned this almost blackly comedic idea of a (spoilers for the script) guy deciding the first thing on his new bucket list should be to get into a fight then, all of a sudden, accidentally killing the man he manages to get to fight him. The guys seemed to respond to this idea and although I was pretty uncomfortable with the idea of writing anything purporting to be a comedy, I decided I could probably write this character into a shorter script.
So that idea sat about in my notebook (which my girlfriend has described as the place ideas go to die - she’s a pretty great artist, herself) for a long while, and then over the last couple of months, I started developing it into more of a structured narrative. I think this period went on a little too long as it always does with me because I’m a bit afraid of actually starting - afraid that I’ll butcher what I’ve so long thought could be the most poignant statement on humanity ever committed to a Final Draft document, so long as I don’t butcher it.
Anyway. The script itself is a bit less grand in its scope than that initial idea. I really wanted to capture that feeling you get when you meet someone from school you never liked. That sort of boiling urge to tell them exactly how you feel about them, and also the dull ache of all those insecurities that were birthed back then, when you were all a little younger and more malleable, the ones you still have today. I also wanted it to be a bit about the violence of some of the relationships young men have. The kind of hierarchy of masculine traits you sort yourselves into, then attempt to climb over one another to reach the top. I’m a bit worried it’s a hamfisted message or statement in the story - you’ll be the judge of that I suppose - but I do half think that maybe it does work fine as it is.
Obviously, the story is born from a very subjective experience; it was clearly an insecure young man who wrote this. But I do hope that I’ve been able to avoid reducing each of the representatives of the male bonding experience down to caricature. It was my intention that, regardless of the limited space nineteen pages provide, the relationships could breathe and reflect some kind of reality, not that the script was to be a parable or morality tale for young angry men.