Barbara Turner

Barbara Turner died in April. I've been in deep denial, dreading/avoiding writing anything at all about it, as if the act of writing will be a horrible homework assignment which will end with me facing the cold fact that she is not here any longer. Alternately kind and caustic, hilarious and serious she was a formative presence in my life.

I had just been accepted to AFI in Screenwriting and needed a summer job before the semester began (and student loan $ rolled in). I went up to AFI and looked on the job board (this is in 1997, internet just a baby) and saw an announcement for screenwriter Barbara Turner needing a research assistant. I knew just who she was from seeing Georgia (and from reading her corresponding interview in Scenario magazine.) My heart pounded when I called the number. A real screenwriter. I was given an address and told to come by to meet Barbara the next day.

"The pay is shit". These are among the first words Barbara said to me as I sat at her kitchen table. Though early afternoon she was drinking prosecco. By good fortune she had two scripts back-to-back that had to be written & researched in short order, one based on a historical account of 2 possessed girls in early 19th century Illinois, and the other an adaptation of a novel set on Majorca in the 1500's. Each would require a high volume of research.  She had already hired another AFI Screenwriting student named Guy Davis and would I like to join them? I muttered "sounds good" and tried to play cool but inside my heart was doing flips. I could see a framed award from the NY Film Critics Circle on a nearby shelf. This is inner circle shit. I've made it! I didn't mention that I hated doing research or talking to people lest that sway her decision to hire me.

Guy and I started in earnest the next day. First up was the Illinois project. Barbara as writer had the same degree of commitment as a hardcore method actor. Which is to say, it wasn't enough to know the names of artifacts and customs and principles of 19th century Illinois, she had to fully comprehend them at the molecular level. Each day found her sitting at her desk or in a chair in her office reading for 7, 8, 9 hours while myself and Guy were sent out into the corners of Los Angeles tracking down books, maps, folios, daguerreotypes, poems, farmer's almanacs. I spent a week chasing a period song down, finally finding sheet music at the UCLA Music Library. We got it to a pianist and had him record himself playing/singing on cassette tape so she could hear it. (The net result in the screenplay was a line of description: They enter the house and  hear "Period Song" being played on a piano in the next room). After 6 weeks or so of dedicated research Barbara begin writing.

screenplay drafts on legal pads

The process in short: She sat in her chair next to her sharpened pencils and wrote the script out in longhand on legal pads, starting at page 1 and going page by page to the end. Guy and I (and her research coordinator Chris) were all a room or two away in case we were needed.
"Brian?" I'd be summoned suddenly after an hour of silence.
"Yes?"
"Which book had the picture of the dray-wright reattaching the wheel?"
"I'll look"
"Thank you. And I need all the notes on that parade.  And the spiritualists"
Moments later I'd return with a stack of things. She'd check what she needed and return to writing.

At the end of each day she'd phone her friend and former assistant Pam in NYC and read what she'd written over the phone, Pam would type along and then fax the pages back to Barbara (again, pre-internet really). The next day would repeat until the script was finished. And by finished I don't mean a draft was finished, I mean the script was complete after one pass owing to the depth of Barbara's commitment and research and her deep talent. The screenplay was invariably also awesome and lyrical and pitch-perfect. (note: get your hands on her work.)

a million yrs ago in nyc

Barbara was always a real-world counter-point to the screenwriting dogma I was absorbing at AFI. You should not do X in a screenplay or Award-winning scripts do this by page X. Her screenplays transcended these. They talked about how the camera was moving, about if it was a medium or tight shot; they had expository paragraphs just for the reader; they talked about the rhythm of the cutting. All standarized verboten in a million screenplay seminars and a million hastily-assembled how-to screenwriting books. Years later Barbara learned that her one of her screenplays was used in a film school class as an example of WHAT TO NEVER DO IN A SCREENPLAY and she, true to her nature, took this as great honor, as proof positive that her work was landing correctly in the world.

One of the most vital things to Barbara was how a screenplay sounded. When I would nervously pass her my specs a frequent note after she read it was: I think you need to hear it. (Another common note: You should direct this.) How the words flowed on the page and in the reader's eye and ear was the aim, how the writer's voice presented itself and landed, in lilt and command.

My tenure working directly for Barbara ended in the fall with the start of film school but since Barbara still needed help (and Margaret - my girlfriend at the time, now wife - needed a job,) Barbara hired Margaret as research assistant.  They worked together for several years and across time Barbara became a dear friend and ally.

To put it cleanly: I learned more about being a writer watching Barbara work than from any book, any class, any interaction in Hollywood. She was a true artist (an overused phrase to be sure, but one that contains how commitment to art/form can yield returns, sometimes at a cost). A true sui generis writer in a town bloated with self-announced unique snowflakes, one whose slender but respectable body of produced work betrays the volume and scope of her true abilities and genius. Many of the best things she wrote are as yet unproduced.

Barbara's desk

There is so much else that can be said but it will just veer into uncollected ramble. The ache of loss and love I feel for Barbara, along with my unwillingness to accept that she is dead are intertwined. Mostly I miss talking with her, getting her opinion on my screenplays, seeing movies with her, deconstructing the latest celebrated indie film, drinking prosecco with her at her kitchen table in the early afternoon, watching shadows slowly extend across the backyard.  I miss the feeling of sitting down to read her latest screenplay and marveling at the movie to be made from the words on the page, the feel of those words - her words - and the lilt and command of her voice.

Barbara is amazing. I say it in the present tense because I feel her in the present tense. Here and not here at once.  I imagine her now, sitting next to me in a dark theater watching current cinema and whispering "I can't believe what I'm seeing" at terrible acting or dialogue. More than anything I have memories of her in tiny moments like this.

from the thank you page of  Margaret's book People Like You

ingress/egress

briefest of visits to southern calif this wknd. the 'why' is difficult to answer succinctly but involves attending a play (twice in 20 hrs!) as well as the good fortune of some jet-blue vouchers which made it even remotely possible.

as w/ our last visit - in mid-december - being there was a strange collision of past/future; a seemingly contradictory interplay of who we are and who we were for 7 yrs there, but this time in a highly-compacted short amount of time.

we landed in LB, drove to LA, had dinner and went to play. afterward, by the sheerest of coincidences c was in town (playing w/ viva voce) at the freshly reopened regent theater [which was directly across from a vacant lot that i happened to be in some 10 years earlier setting up tents for a film during the stretch that m and i refer to as "peanut butter summer" as due to horrid $ situation we subsisted on nothing but pb. what gorgeous memories those are].
next day we had coffee and went for a hike w/ A & I. The canyons were actually green the sun was un-oppressive. back to home-base and then to the play again, this time w/ different cast in key roles, which changed the entire timbre and tone of play but not harmfully. Then dinner, then home-base w/ too much champagne and script notes and war stories. next morning millies w/ E, walking around the grove and pan pacific park w/ S and then back to LB.

LA is fixed in amber, a pulsing flow of ambition/desire held in a small untranslate-able box. Living there - for us anyhow - required a tacit agreement to peer past the unpleasantness. Probably this is common in any metropolitan area but in this case the trade off is housed in the abstract ("this will all pay off when i sell my script sells...") rather than some definite or absolute benefit. It is the ambition that pulls you through, makes the compromises, allows you to let yourself do things you wouldn't normally do. There are multiple personal components to this for me that I won't get into about screenwriting and directing so these reflections are all informed by that. Which is all a tortured way of saying: we are glad to be home...

and you are (t)here...

i am quite certain i'm unable to fully articulate the range of what i'm driving at but i'll attempt it nonetheless: for seven yrs in los angeles i was fueled by a sort of epic ambition to achieve something. that unnamed something was codified and entwined in the Film Industry and there was - to me - zero percent chance of me achieving it w/o setting myself in LA. yet at the same time i internally separated myself from everyone else in LA: i simply wasn't that superficial, my artistic aims were more esoteric, more indie, more off the map etc so much so that any naked ambition i had was - i thought - neutralized by the 'purity' of what i outwardly pursued. but inwardly you see it was the exact same thing i was driving at. inwardly it was the exact same thing fueling me as fueled everyone. you can argue that this element is present to varying degrees in every single person who writes, draws, paints, makes movies, plays an instrument. i don't know if that's a sound argument or not but you can certainly make it. at my most honest i can confess that driving much of my pursuit in LA was the hunt for acknowledgment and celebration on an epic scale.

now, much like a cancer survivor (ha) i am nearly 5 yrs out of there.

hiking up runyon canyon on an LA visit a few days ago and a pea-soup of smog hung over the basins and valleys and i realized we're all - in los angeles that is - drawing oxygen from the same pool. its ubiquity and pervasiveness makes any type of self-distinguishment farcical. Whether or not you claim you are at least not them you are still forced to acknowledge their presence. you are still intaking identical oxygen and water (bottled or not) - you are there.

my point, and i don't really have one, has something to do w/ relief. gratitude that i made it out, that now - by leaving - i'm closer to what i wanted , that i had to 'fail' there to 'succeed' here. as mm always says i am a lucky sob and i am ever so lucky that i had no real taste of 'success' in los angeles b/c it would have broken me. i would not have been able to shoulder the burden. i would have crumpled, imploded, shrunk down, been hollowed out. now the codified part of what i want is the same as it was back then but what lies under it, what fuels it, has been altered. it comes from an entirely (mostly) different place and that is a good and beautiful thing.