Too Many Words
by Kieth Merrill
Kieth Merrill on hurling text into the mysterious black hole of the World Wide Web.
You really read this stuff! Some of you found me in cyberspace and told me so. It makes writing this column much more exhausting. In fact, if you are really going to read it, I find it down right intimidating.
If Meridian Magazine didn’t entice my ego with the title of “Film Editor”–which no one ever sees of course–or I didn’t love movies so much, confidence would wain, courage would falter, words would fail, and I would be paralyzed by the terrifying reality that someone out there actually reads these words that expose my soul like a naked statue spouting water in a Greek fountain.
Writing a thousand words once a month–even about movies–and hurling them into the mysterious black hole of //www.–seemed so infinitesimally insignificant, it was almost beyond comprehension to me that of all of the words in the world to read, you bothered to read mine.
I’m a movie guy. My life is about pictures. Or is it? Spielberg–the movie guy in case you have EVER heard of another human being named Spielberg–said it best at the Academy Awards. “It’s the story, it’s the story, it’s the story.” And the story is words. Before there are pictures, before there is sound, before there is a spark that can kindle the intense flame required to launch a motion picture, there are only words.
A Chinese philosopher once said, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” That means a movie at 24 images per second for a hundred and four minutes is the equivalent of 149,760,000 words. Even a Tom Clancy novel–with the inevitable 200 hundred unnecessary encyclopedic pages filled with painfully protracted portraits of plumbing on a submarine, doesn’t have THAT many words.
I cherish words, particularly the ones I never learned at Davis High. I hope Miss Streeper–our dear old English teacher, whom we surely put in an early grave–looks down from her great chalk board in the sky and muses: “He finally got it. That thick-headed farm boy from Farmington got it.” She’d be right. I finally found the wonderful world of words she so desperately wanted me to discover.
There are so many resplendent words we never use, I sometimes wonder if the evolution of our vocabulary is like VHS and Beta. VHS is not the best, it just got there first. We learned the easy words first. “Mama” always comes before “mendacious” for example. We end up clinging to the simple words we learned first and remember them the longest. Maybe learning language is it’s like using a Mac. We can do so much with so little knowledge, we are easily satisfied with survival at the surface, never tapping into the incredible depth of power lying beyond our ken.
In books, words must create pictures that play among the shadows of the mind. In scripts, words must describe images that will be created using shadows, light and imagination. Writing books is “literature.” Writing screenplays is “art.” That curious distinction was burned into my brain one day by an incident I have never forgotten–nor forgiven.
My brother is much smarter than me. He is a PhD with prestigious degrees and citations. He has written books–the kind they read in graduate school. He travels the world lecturing at universities and has lived in the rarified air of academia all his life. He is older than me which leaves me breathlessly optimistic I may still catch up.
As a young film maker, I was excited when he agreed to read my first script. He put it on his pile of essential reading materials and I waited for a week. This script was so good I knew my intellectual brother was going to finally give me the praise I had longed from him my whole life. When I could stand it no longer I went to his office at the University to receive praise for my “masterpiece.”
He seemed at first as if he didn’t remember it at all–or me. Then, as beamed back into reality from some esoteric junket to the cerebral cortex, he found the script in his pile of “read books” and returned it with a left handed compliment I shall never forget.
“Interesting,” he mused, “I admire creativity whatever form it takes.”
Making movies seems really important to those of us immersed in our curious world of light and imagination, but holds little esteem in ivy halls. Writing movies is a form of art–perhaps indeed a craft–longing to be literature. My only consolation, of course, is not one of his books has ever been optioned as a movie.
Wondrous as words are, when it comes to movies, there may be too many words. Some argue sound was the worst thing that ever happened to films. But they forget that even the most extraordinarily visual silent films relied on words printed on the screen to convey a sense of character, time, and place.
The revolution in sound was nothing compared to the revolution in digital imaging. Computers–and George Lucas’ vision–have brought us to the almost unimaginable moment in movie history when what ever we can imagine in our minds, we can create on film and project onto a giant screen. Tools and technology are without bounds. We are only constrained by money and time.
Sound vaulted movies into a whole new era, but crippled creativity by the facile use of dialogue in place of powerful images. Likewise, CGI (computer generated images) and digital effects have catapulted films into visual wonders never imagined, but in too many instances, left “the words” behind. Films like “Water World,” “Starship Troopers” and even “Armageddon” become shallow in the bottomless depths of digital effects.
With so many toys to play with, it is easy to forget that people care about people and sometimes prefer simplicity. A look, a word and touch is almost always more moving than a ravenous horde of gigantic insects, one more horrific explosion.
