The Highly-Illustrated Screenplay Narrative

   The World Bardo  S. and I went to a temple today. It’s the fifth anniversary of her mother Shil An’s death. Suki remembers the exact moment it happened. Her eldest brother Su man has been gone four years, and my brother Richard ten. Since S’s family is Buddhist, Buddhist imagery, ritual and cosmology tends to imbue any anniversary that occurs. My brother wasn’t Buddhist, or any religion at all — if anything, he was nihilistically atheist. Yet in the writings he left behind there is a very pronounced emphasis on “eternal return” and the elementary nature of universal cycles. S. and I often talk of how much he would have enjoyed temples if he’d made it to Asia. In the meantime, my father (just as atheist as my brother) lies in a hospital in Toronto. The medical team reassures me he’s stable. But he himself is obviously nervous when we talk every day on the phone. S. and I have plane tickets and we’ll be able to see him in a week. Cycles continue. And are unpredictable.

  THE HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY NARRATIVE  * HIGH SCHOOL 5 Int. A basement in a low rent row house. Evening. Tom is watching TV — the news. Broadcaster: Our top story tonight — Mao Ze Dong, the revolutionary who became China’s paramount leader and both ruled and transformed that great nation for several decades, is dead. The entire nation is in mourning. From Beijing, our reporter Brian Henderson…. Cut to: Int. The basement. Thirty minutes later. Tom, tired, his expression impassive, fatigued, rises from his impromptu sofa, the weirdly coloured styrofoam slabs, and turns the TV off. Cut to: Tom, in his bedroom, five minutes later. It’s dark out, and dark inside, too. He does not turn off the light in his room to change into pajamas. He just stares hypnotically out the window. SFX: … The wet buzzy drone of the rain….

 THE HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY NARRATIVE  * HIGH SCHOOL 4 Int. Tom’s home. The home is a row house. Basement. Evening. His brother and mother upstairs, Tom sits on a tatty styrofoam pillow the colour of yellow yolk that’s been left to age. SFX: The drone of the TV A motorcycle cop: Don’t you realize that California law stipulates you should check your muffler every six months? Tom, his face impassive, gets to his feet and turns the channel dial. It clicks loudly with every new channel. New voice (on a talk show): Today on Front Page Challenge, we have a guest who was the first Canadian to star in an American western. SFX: Applause.

  THE HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY NARRATIVE  * HIGH SCHOOL 3 Int. A city bus. Evening. Tom is riding home. The steady motion of the bus. The rain outside.

   THE HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY NARRATIVE  * HIGH SCHOOL 2b Int. A high school classroom in 1976. English class. Day. It’s raining outside. The students seem numbed out by the topic at hand: the blood motif in Macbeth. One student, TOM, seems particularly uninterested. Yet at the same time, he listens carefully to Mr. Barrett’s words, searching, it would appear, for vital meaning.

The Highly Illustrated Screenplay Narrative  HIGH SCHOOL 1 Exterior. A city street. Early evening. The sky — bright fifteen minutes ago — is now heavy with thick grey. Pedestrians make their way along the sidewalk with the expressions of those just released from labour: office workers, students…

 These are two examples from the novel/ screenplay novel The Business Army. Both archival photographs and my own drawings were used.