E.C. Authors David Licata and Rolando Teco recently embarked on an extended conversation on the subject of fame. Here's part seven, the final installment of their exchange:
In the last post, RT asked DL: "And how about you, David? Any of your feature-length scripts cry out for names?"
DL: I wrote Girls Will Be Boys, an adaptation and modernization of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. I set it in a present day, fictional college, and I think this script would work very nicely with an ensemble cast of young, attractive, heart-throb-by actors, maybe television actors who were ready stretch a little bit and wanted to leap to the big screen.
I didn’t really set out to write a commercial script. Twelfth Night is my favorite Shakespeare comedy and I love the gender-bending aspect of it. I also thought adapting Shakespeare would be a great writing lesson, and it was. When I decided to set the piece in a college it became obvious that the audience that would be most receptive to it would be people a little bit younger than the characters, and then it became obvious that to get that audience interested in the film there would need to be actors that had a teen following. Still, I don’t think of the screenplay as a “teen” project. The themes are very adult--identity, gender, and sexuality. I also believe an older audience would enjoy this film as a sort of nostalgia trip: though it takes place in the present, the kind of college experiences I'm writing about are universal. And if a person is into Shakespeare at all, I think it would be fun to watch for the references. I can pretty much guarantee that Girls Will Be Boys would make for a better film than She’s the Man (2006), the most recent Twelfth Night adaptation. I wrote my script before that film was released, and when it came out my heart sank below my feet.
As I said earlier, I really don’t know who these young actors are, so I have no idea who I’d cast in this now. I guess I'd have to start watching TV.
I'm with you on the joys of the collaborative process with actors, and I'd hope (maybe naively) that would happen with young name-ish actors in a lower-budget production. Perhaps they wouldn't be spoiled yet, or maybe they would rebel against the PR machine and immerse themselves in the work, or maybe they'd welcome the chance to truly contribute to the film, to be treated like the artists they are and not just as flesh puppets. This is what I could offer, since in all likelihood I couldn't offer the big paychecks they're used to getting.
RT: Well, this was interesting. Let's do this again sometime, on some other topic. Hmm...
