Hello fellow script/screenplay writers!
As the title indicates, I'm about 1/2 done with writing and editing the script for my docudrama.
PLEASE ONLY RESPOND IF YOU:
1. Read ALL of this
2. Like the content and story a LOT (not hard, but I guess I'm biased)
3. Are VERY ACCOMPLISHED with screenplay/script writing and editing
4. Can post links that show evidence of your skills here
5. Write me an email that demonstrates that you read it, "get" it as much as you can so far, and
can demonstrate that you would be a good addition to my writing team.
I'm just back from the Sundance Film Festival, my 4th timeamazing!
Then on for the end of SxSW tomorrow!
If you are not in LA, and can only work on Zoom, we will possibly consider you, but ideally we want locals so we can meet in person.
My name is Scott Hannon, the 14-year-old in one photo and the 45-year-old next to Pelosi. That event was the Inaugural Ball for Obama's first term. The next image is some of the 200 grandfather documents. Next is proof (which you can also see in person) that I really did save 16 years of answering machine messages. Then the letter from Steinbeck, which is also in the video of the book I designed at the end. Next is a Pulitzer member of out team. Then my dad at age 78 (accompanying video below). Finally, the end of doc short I did years ago, link to the doc below.
I'm now 57.
Stick through to the end of this! It will be worth it!
This summary includes the 4 main PILLARS of my docudrama, and then a few video segments already made to help you understand what is going on here and what my team is looking for!
I'm a UC Berkeley (BA History), Harvard (MA Social Studies Education), Pepperdine (MA Psychology), and Columbia (EdD in Education, Media, Storytelling) who did the education, counseling-related careers, and am now a documentary filmmaker. Don't we all love how Film is the most interdisciplinary of the art forms?
I'm currently making my dream docudrama, with the help of a few other award-winning filmmakers. Since this is a story about my family, as well as "Western" history, I've been writing and designing this film for years.
My team has determined that it is time to find someone who is an expert at scripts for such docudrama, can sit with me and others and make necessary edits/trims, and who knows how to put it into the professional script format.
The title is undecided, but possibilities are (top so far)
1. “Leave me my FatherAfter the Beep"
2. "Finding Father"
3. “Messaging Machine"
Here is the basic premise of my docudrama (probably double the length of most films, maybe done as a series in two parts), based on 4 PILLARS, covering an almost 85-year period of history (since the beginning of World War II):
1. PILLAR #1: Me and my 16 consecutive years of saved answering machine messages
I did the unthinkable, the incomprehensible, the inconceivable (Wallace Shawn's reference from Princess Bride, and we will have one clip of him saying that in the film). I saved every-single-one-of-my-answering-maching-messages fordrum roll16 consecutive years (1988 - 2004).
Let that sink in for a moment.
Let me be more clear and specific. I persistently, but joyfully, transferred/recorded EACH of my messages from the voice box on the table (yes, with those tiny tapes inside) onto those famed and nostalgic 90-minute cassette tapes. And I have upward of 80 of these 90-minute cassettes.
Sorry to bring you back to middle school, but let's do the Math:
80 tapes x 90 minutes per tape = 7200 minutes of recording.
But taking into consideration silences, gaps, and sometimes the outgoing messages themselves (which we won't count), let's round down and call it 6000 minutes of actual messages.
That's 100 hours of messages, or over 4 full days' worth of messages.
I covered the fascinating 16 years from 1988 - 2004!
Not only with the most personal of shares, regular messages, and many comedies but also many mentions of the historical and cultural events of the time.
The fall of the Berlin Wall.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The Clintons taking power.
The freedom of Mandella and the end of Apartheid.
Rodney King-related events/riots, etc.
Madonna rising up the charts.
The films Forrest Gump and American Beauty (of course many other great films came out, I'm just mentioning 2 for brevity).
Cell phones, email, and the masses getting Internet (just that little thing).
The Supreme Court handed the 2000 election to Bush.
9/11 (side note, part of the 9/11 memorial museum is hundreds of the final cell phone calls from those in the towersheartbreaking).
The beginning of the Iraq War.
Yeah.
Yes, they are 100% authentic, and at some point, if you want proof, you could use an old-school audio tape player, reach into the pile, fast forward or rewind anywhere you want, press play, and there you would hear one of the messages.
Messages from family, best friends, friends, acquaintances, and yes those random calls from, say, the phone company calling to remind of bills due (which will end up adding some humor to it all!), etc.
According to the opinions of over 100 documentarians I've met in LA and NYC, this is a priceless time capsule of the intimate voices of the 90's.
It is DOCUMENTARY GOLD.
Ira Glass from NPR's "This American Life" (whom I met and talked to at Sundance) wants to do a piece on it, a few podcasts have expressed interest, and a friend at the Smithsonian American History Museum wants them to be part of their collection.
But what is the back story on why I was so nostalgic about my father, my family, and other friends, that I would aware save this treasure trove, this time capsule?
2. PILLAR #2: My father Denis Hannon
Understanding my dad and his life is instrumental to understanding why I became the "most nostalgic person in the world", and saved 16 years of messages.
You see, my dad has been described by some as the most interesting, charismatic person in the recent history in the state of Arizona
Why do we not make the claim of the entire Southwest? Well, I guess it might be considered quite a stretch to include places like LA in this ranking, given the personalities there. I just decided for this film to make this claim about Arizona.
Even if he is in the top 3 or 5 in Arizona, it's still story-worthy!
We are going to make the case that he was the most interesting person in Arizona for a 30-40 year period
Not the wealthiest, or most powerful, or politically savvy, or most ethical.
Just the MOST INTERESTING (an admittedly subjective term, but let's have fun with this).
And here is why (and we have ample testimonial to back this up).
My dad grew up the son of an American diplomat (who observed the Nuremberg Trial and was part of the Marshall Plan), and got to travel all over the world as a kid. His dad was Assistant to the American Cultural Ambassador to Switzerland.
During this time his siblings and parents lived in a castle overlooking a valley near Bern. He and my uncles and aunts remember diplomat parties that were similar to the famous dance scene "So Long, Farewell" from the Sound of Music.
He inherited intelligence, but more importantly, he developed a keen sense of humor and wit during this time.
His family returned to Berkeley in 1952-5 where he was the Sea Scout boy and newspaper boy that friends instinctively crowded around to hear stories of world travel.
Fast forward to his 20's and early 30's, my dad hung out in famed Laurel Canyon, which one associates 70s LA (parties with Neil Young, Tom Petty, etc)!
This was, of course, a time when people experimented with many different kinds of drugs. During this time my dad also made several trips to India and Nepal, at about the same time as the Beatles were"experimenting".
When he eventually settled in Phoenix, he slowly built a real estate business and landlord-ed (at different times) a youth hostel, a trailer park, a rooming house, and an apartment complex with 30 tenants.
But most important and relevant is that his stories from growing up abroad (and seeing a tattered Europe), several years in Berkeley, several in LA, and a year total in India/Nepal, combined with audiences made up of his Phoenix tenants and friends, led to him being almost a professional storyteller; people crowded around him to hear his tales and humor.
He organized and ran the Phoenix Humanists group each week. He also went once a week (for over a quarter of a century) to the huge local auction in Phoenix, where a community of friends met up EVERY SUNDAY to buy rare vintage items and to tell stories over coffee.
He constantly was surrounded by people socializing, making music, doing drugs, and telling stories.
One certainly could make a direct analogy to Jack Kerouak and the Merry Pranksters…but the Arizona version! And we may make that analogy in the film.
Now, since my dad was the most interesting person in Arizona, you can imagine how LITTLE ACCESS to him I had.
Combined with two fiercely jealous wives (the two after my mom), my time with him was limited to just a couple weeks a year, if that. All other communications occurred on the phone, often when his wife was not home.
I saved every letter and photo he sent to me.
And oh how I treasured, even more, each conversation I had with him!
I wanted to remember them all, but how would that ever happen?
When he called but I was not there to answer, he left the most extraordinary, lovely, magical, witty 2-4 minute messages that you can imagine.
Many times I LET IT GO TO THE ANSWERING MACHINE rather than pick up so that I had a record of his 2-4 minute "messages in a bottle" (the machine being the bottle) to me.
Then I'd usually pick up at the end of his message, or call him back in a few minutes, pretending I'd been occupied with something or had just walked in.
Then I'd listen to his messages before deleting them.
After many years of wishing I'd saved my dad's extraordinary messages, I started to do so in the late 80's.
In addition to my dad's messages, I also saved messages from my friends (each of whom had their charisma, many of them actors and storytellers).
Systematically. Every single message. for 16 years.
With the patience of someone like Richard Linklater in his filming of Boyhood, who filmed that movie over 12 years!
We'd love to get Linklater to help direct and/or produce this film!
Linklater did "Tape" (obvious connection!), the "Before Series" (focus on depth of connection, as well as TIME),
Slackers (he captures Austin TX characters in the '80s, my tapes capture Berkeley characters in the 90s, and "Waking Life" (which plays creatively with time, imagination, and dreams).
Fun note: I experimented with interesting "outgoing messages" (using, in fact, well-known jingles from TV shows from the 50s-70s), designed for comedy and to lure out more interesting and elaborate messages on my machine.
And so then, a full decade and a half after I stopped saving them when I had all but forgotten about them, I stumbled upon the box of messages behind the cobwebs of my family's attic and instantly realized that I'd accidentally discovered a time capsule of gold in the form of "the private phone messages of the pre-cell phone and pre-internet 90's America", featuring front and center the arguably most interesting and colorful character in all of Arizona.
3. PILLAR #3: My grandfather Stuart L. Hannon, the American diplomat and Democratic presidential consultant
NOTE: I just self-produced (Snapfish) a 90-page coffee table book with all his documents in full color, along with my commentary on those documents. This will serve as a guide, a storyboard if you will, for you and/or those who go on the make the film! I'LL HAVE A VIDEO OF MY WALKING THROUGH THAT BOOK UP SOON FOR YOU TO SEE!
We have about 130 documents from his life so far, as mentioned in the videos below.
So far my team (several selected so far out of over 200 applying) thinks the film will start with me at age 5, soon after the divorce and lonely for my dad, and use the general method of a few key flashbacks, telling the story of my grandfather AFTER the story of me, my messages, and my father.
And like any well-designed film that covers a large period (80 years in this case), we must look back at the past to understand the present.
My grandfather was raised in Seattle and met his wife in a Russian class in the 30's. His wife Mimi had her own radio show in SF Bay.
My grandfather combined his radio and political savvy to:
a. Broadcast a show from the SF Bay called "Above the Battle" with updates about the state of WW2.
b. Help out diplomatically with WW2 and the Marshall Plan
c. Be an official observer of the Nuremberg Trials
d. Support the President of Greece during one of their most turbulent times (1948).
e. Be the assistant to the Swiss-American Cultural Ambassador
f. Be the #2 man to the Director of Radio Free Europe (see reference above to "Video Killed the Radio Star")
g. Advise and correspond with Adlai Stevenson in his (losing) campaign against Dwight Eisenhower
h. Advise and correspond with LBJ both while he was a Texas Senator and while he was President
i. Resisting Soviet aggression while also resisting the McCarthyist witch hunt scare frenzy.
j. Help to bring an end to the Vietnam War (letters document this)
h. MOST INTERESTING: Correspond with John Steinbeck in 1958, writing about Pasternak, the Soviet Nobel Prize Winner in Literature. Pasternak wrote the script for the famous film Dr. Zhivago.
It was in this climate that my dad and his siblings were raised, sometimes living with their mom away from the action, sometimes along with their dad on these diplomatic trips.
At the risk of this being too long, I'll sum it all up by it leading to some very interesting life experiences for my father, combined with also not having much access to a personal relationship with his father, often having to compete with the other siblings, as well as media who came into their home.
In fact, my grandfather was gone so much of the time, and my dad missed him so much, that he asked for access to his dad's radio broadcasts so that he could at least get to know him from his VOICE.
If you didn’t see the glaring way in which that last sentence gives away the key to this entire film, well, perhaps you do now.
And if your mind explodes with inspiration for this film, a film that if done with expert help could register as one of the top 100-200 films ever made, then you are just the person I want on my team to create this TEASER TRAILER.
4. PILLAR #4: Denis' descent into Alzheimer's, 2015-2023. He died on November 12, 2023. And just so you know, I'm doing pretty good with my grievingit's a process.
His passing is why I finally have the time and inspiration to press the accelerator on this documentary.
In this section, I will reveal that I documented my dad's descent into Alzheimer's just about as systematically as any Alzheimer's patient. The footage is as raw, authentic, and entertaining as any you could imagine.
Remember, during these 7 years of Alzheimer's I recorded someone who had accumulated (up to the start of the Alzheimer's) 75 years of one of the most interesting lives in all of Arizona, and he did not shy away from telling those stories, even as he lost his memory.
IT IS THE FACT THAT DAD WAS ONE OF THE TRUE LOVERS OF STORY AND MEMORY (AS MOST STORYTELLERS ARE) WHO THEN LOST HIS MEMORY (THUS HIS CAPACITY TO COVER ALL THE DETAILS) THAT MAKES THIS FOOTAGE SHOCKINGLY RELEVANT, POWERFUL, AND BEAUTIFUL.
I'll remind the reader that Alzheimer's is one of the most relevant topics in all of medicine and psychology at this time, the 5th ranked killer and perhaps the most mysterious. With a lot of money going toward research about it!
A relevant film clip of the hundreds that could be used in this film are the two below in SECTION D. Admittedly the first one needs the lighting adjusted with the help of video technology.
In it, you will see me and Dad listening (while looking at his own 1959 high school photo) to a famous 70's song titled "Cat in the Cradle" which, to some extent, captures the Zeitgeist of my dad's relationship with his father, and my dad's relationship with me.
The other short clip is of my dad talking about memory and time passing.
How is all of this pulled together in one paragraph?
Perhaps something like:
"An epic son-father-grandfather (with other important characters, but its focus is male parent-child issues), a tale spanning the last quarter of a century. The smash of modern society and technologies took them away from each other. And yet hidden in the cracks were breadcrumbs, in the form of recorded voices, that provided clues to knowing each other.
The son, yearning to understand, not wanting to continually delete an already much-deleted dad, surrendered to his nostalgia and saved 16 consecutive years of his answering machine messages. In the hopes of finding his lost dad and granddad.
(Possible) Title: "LEAVE ME MY DAD…AFTER THE BEEP"
Now, here are a few links that provide some sense of added reality to this project
A. A preliminary trailer (if you can even call it that) in the form of a 3-minute narration (in two parts) I made of my dad,
a Pulitzer-Prize-winning member of our team named Paul Brinkley-Rogers, evidence of the 200 papers that make up my grandfather's diplomatic career, and footage of the original 16 years of answering machine messages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-EjIQfvvfM
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wjRIVUcR2Xc
B. A doc-short I made in 2015 about community in the SF Bay Area that provides a small example of 2 of the approximate 10,000 messages I saved from 1988 - 2004:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcTJq9QrTa4&t=7s
C. For those who geek out about the time period of my grandfather's heyday (diplomacy, resisting Soviet aggression, Radio Free Europe, etc), you might want to listen to only known (as of yet) audio recording of one of my grandfather's many talks. This one took place in September 1960, just before Kennedy beat Nixon, titled "The New Soviet Offensive".
And yes, this is PARTICULARLY RELEVANT as of Feb 24, 2022, when Putin invaded Ukraine!
https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/new-soviet-offensive-09021960
D. Two of a few thousand video clips made by me from 2015-2023 documenting my dad's descent into Alzheimer's,
which play a role in telling the larger 80-ish-year story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAQY0FvL8Cc
Here is just one of several hundred videos that show my dad's presence while he speaks, his tone of voice,
and his simple wisdom. Just imagine what can be done with videos like this in the process of telling this story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7qcjMM277c
E. This is (in 3 parts) a video I made explaining the content of the self-published 90-page book I made about my grandfather, Stuart L. Hannon. For anyone working intensely on this part of the film, I'll provide you with an actual hard copy of the book!
PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR THEM BEING UPSIDE DOWN, YOU CAN FLIP YOUR PHONE OR COMPUTER.
I'LL TRY TO FIX THIS SOON.
Part 1: https://youtu.be/m44bGhCZ6F0
Part 2: https://youtu.be/34FBhaBHyqo
Part 3: https://youtu.be/oeQs67d5K9o
Finally, if you have made it this far (which demonstrates your true interest), and think you can help write/edit the script to profession standard, please reach out!
Please, in your email to me, in addition to your resume, include A PARAGRAPH OR TWO WITH YOUR REACTION TO ALL OF THIS!
Finally, I humbly ask you please do NOT respond to this ad unless you are quite accomplished and qualified.
My regular film team, to which we might extend an invitation to join in the future, is full of award-winners and other extraordinary talents.
Thank you immensely,
Scott