Esther, your 2009 Frenzy Script Never the Bride actually started as a five-page script that was then made into a short film and will be submitted to the QWOCMAP SF Queer Women of Color Film Festival in 2010. Can you tell us more about the festival? What was most challenging about expanding your five-pages to a feature-length script?
QWOCMAP (phew, long acronym!) stands for, “Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project.” It’s a non-profit organization founded by Madeline Lim, who aims to increase the visibility of queer women of color in the media.
Each year, Madeline puts out a call for submissions. She then selects around 30 participants to partake in a 16 week course which prepares her students to write, direct, shoot, and edit their own short films for the festival. It’s an amazing program which helps empower people to learn and run the whole gamut of filmmaking, and it definitely opens up lots of opportunities for the filmmakers, the actors we cast, and the stories we’d like to tell, which are very uncommon in the mass media.
Our films screen this year from June 12-14th, at the Brava Theater. My film, Never the Bride, will be screening next year around the same time, in June 2010.
My short film for the festival, was originally a five-page script, which had to be condensed to meet the time limit. So I decided to expand upon the story to meet Script Frenzy’s 100-page challenge! Without giving too much away, it’s a romantic comedy about two women (Esther, the protagonist, and her best friend/bridesmaid, Mabel) who plot revenge, having one week to stage a fake wedding with a mannequin and a five dollar budget to upstage Esther’s ex-girlfriend.
In my short film, Esther and Mabel’s relationship is established very quickly, and so I needed to think about ways to show the two slowly falling for each other in the full-length version. This was very challenging for me, because the two characters are complete opposites who couldn’t be any more unlike one another. Esther, who is actually only lightly based on a version of myself, is very animated, extroverted, zany, and foolhardy. Mabel, her counterpart, is very deadpan, reserved, elegant and refined. Esther is physically tougher, being a boxer, but emotionally vulnerable and very sensitive when her elaborate, madcap plans always fail. Mabel, who is very dainty and resembles a noir-like femme fatal, says little, yet somehow always ends up gracefully saving the day. The two actresses who played these roles in my short film, (Goldie Chan and Sandra Young) did an AMAZING, flawless job inhabiting both characters, and I think having the privilege to watch them act out the two roles gave me a wealth of ideas to expand upon based on their mannerisms and interactions with one another on camera.
Another one of the most difficult challenges was that I found myself having to “get into character” to write Mabel’s scenes. Usually when I write fiction or screenplays, I try to do a sort of “method acting” to really understand my characters, and so I found myself going to wine bars, wearing black dresses, and skulking about, listening to lots of Garbage, Hole, and The Cardigans, trying to lower my energy to get into Mabel’s moody mindset. The interesting thing about Mabel is that although she seems so deadpan outwardly, it’s truly because she harnesses a great deal of loyalty and passion inwardly—she’s just afraid to express it, and that cynicism is her method of controlling it.
I am definitely grateful to Script Frenzy for giving me the kick start and resources that I needed to turn out a full-length script. I’m currently on rewrite #5 and hoping to get it produced very soon! As of now, I know of no gay wedding movies made in the US—and I hope to someday write the first one.
Esther received her BA from the University of San Francisco and her MA from New College of California, with a concentration in screenwriting. Her short stories, opinion columns, as well as art and film critiques have been featured in The Bay Area Reporter, GO NYC Magazine, and Shecky's Bar and Lounge Guide. She is the winner of the first annual University of San Francisco creative non-fiction award, recipient of a departmental merit scholarship, and has reviews featured in Maximum Rock and Roll Magazine for her appearance in Fork, Knife, and Spoon. She’s currently working on her full-length screenplay of Never the Bride. (Find out more at www.neverthebridemovie.com)
