Library & Resources

Praxis Fellows Profile

Writer/Director Penelope Buitenhuis
Graduating from the SFU film program in 1984, Penelope Buitenhuis was an edgy young filmmaker with a punk aesthetic and a radical ideology. On a European tour with her gritty super 8 films about squatters and graffiti artists, her Berlin screening sold out and she was given a full page in a leftist daily paper. That got her hooked on Berlin’s heady mix of sex, politics and counterculture; she moved there for the next ten years. In Berlin she expanded on her experimental shorts with documentaries and a first feature called Trouble, which won numerous festival awards.

“Fassbinder led me to Germany,” says Buitenhuis, “and Rae Dawn Chong brought me back.” Trouble’s cinematographer was Chong’s boyfriend, and she was so impressed by the film that she got Buitenhuis attached to direct her, Lance Henriksen and Lou Diamond Phillips in a Canadian feature, Boulevard.

Now it was 1994; the Wall had fallen and Berlin was no longer such a magnet. New directing opportunities called Buitenhuis back to Vancouver, with frequent commitments in Toronto. In the past eight years she’s directed a thriller, Dangerous Attraction, along with the Gemini-nominated MOW Giant Mine and episodes of Cold Squad, Lonesome Dove, Madison, Kung Fu, and Wind at My Back. Most recently she’s done an NFB documentary, Tokyo Girls, about Western women who work as hostesses in Japanese bars, and a Twin Peaks-like new series for Showcase, Paradise Falls.

Her feature screenplay Bleed was workshopped at Praxis in Fall ’95 with American producer Karen Murphy (Drugstore Cowboy, This Is Spinal Tap) as her advisor. Bleed is a contemporary dramatic thriller about a VJ, her pregnant friend and a sick stalker. After a quick rewrite, Buitenhuis pitched it in Los Angeles but was told ‘relationship dramas’ weren’t selling just then. She plans to write a new draft, but these days she’s focused on another feature project, Punk Not Dead, for which she’s received development funding from British Columbia Film.

It’s clear that, successful as she’s been as a director for hire, Buitenhuis hasn’t given up her passion for working independently. She’s committed to polishing Punk Not Dead and greatly values the few months of free time that development funding will buy her. “Writer/director films have a stronger vision,” she says. Although writing is a means to the end of creative control, she feels that once she successfully completes her current project, she might start to look for like-minded screenplays by other writers. Meanwhile, she’s off to the Montréal World Film Festival for the premiere of Tokyo Girls.

Updates

Anthony Couture’s first feature Red Deer is Praxis’s sixteenth — the low-budget film formerly called Ask Me Tomorrow was part of our Fall 95/Summer 96 workshops, with Advisors Christine Vachon and Don McKellar.

Red Deer, which premieres at the Toronto Film Festival and comes to Vancouver next month, is described in the TIFF catalogue as a Wenders-like observation of six lonely characters, each longing with unrequited love, that ‘shows a remarkable talent for observing the quiet, humorous details of everyday life.’

Marlene Rodgers, a recent Praxis advisor and teacher, is on the festival circuit with Foxy Lady, Wild Cherry, a short film financed by the OFDC’s Calling Card Program which she wrote and produced.

Tara Twigg, VP of Development at Sextant Entertainment, has moved to run the Vancouver office of Alex Raffe’s new production company, Savi Media.

Laël McCall and Penny Wheelwright have been on the road shooting not one but two documentaries this summer. The first, The Orkney Lad: The Story of Isabel Gunn was directed by Anne Wheeler. The second, Hair, There and Everywhere has been directed by Penny.

Andrew Currie’s first feature Mile Zero shoots from September 25 - October 27 with funding from Telefilm Canada and British Columbia Film. Andrew, an SFU Film alumnus and two-time Praxis Fellow, directs. The script is written by Michael Melski and is a father-son relationship drama.

Former Praxis Advisor Bruce Sweeney has just completed shooting his third feature Last Wedding with loyal cast members Babz Chula, Benjamin Ratner, Tom Scholte and Nancy Sivak, along with Molly Parker — all of whom have participated in our script readings in past years.

Renny Bartlett, former Praxis Fellow (Fall ’93) with his first feature, Arktikos, has a new film, Eisenstein, also premiering at the Toronto Film Festival. Filmed in Russia and Mexico with a crew of up to 200, the film is a Faustian biography of the great director, a master of dialectic who was torn between his artistic and political ideals and the compromises needed for survival.

Rodger Cove’s script The Taxidermist (formerly Fair Game) has been optioned by producer Jonathan Kay and received development funding from British Columbia Film.

New Superchannel fellowship
Thanks to a boost from Superchannel’s Shelley Gillen, we now have a third fellowship which will support a Praxis writer through the Spring or Fall workshop. This ongoing support from our friends at Superchannel will cover costs of one Fellow’s travel and accommodations as well as workshop expenses.

The Return of Laël McCall
Producer Laël McCall returns for a four-month stint as Interim Director of Praxis while Patricia Gruben is on a study leave to work on a book and screenplay. Laël filled the same post last fall and was instrumental in setting up our sponsored fellowships as well as increasing our contacts with film distributors and broadcasters. Before moving to Vancouver in 1998, she was VP at Alliance Pictures (now Alliance Atlantis).

Screenwriting Competition

Spring 2001

Tracey Izatt • Tennyson’s Wake
The wild adventures of a young woman who inherits a bar in the middle of nowhere and finds herself caught up in a biker gang’s quest for money embezzled by her father.Tracey was a holdover from Spring 99; her advisor for this go-round was Michael Miner, who assisted her in workshopping the script with actors. She’s aiming for a winter shoot, which she’ll direct, in New Brunswick.

Ori Kowarsky • Various Positions
The emotionally complex tale of a love affair between a law student from an Orthodox Jewish family and a mercurial young woman. His advisor was Maureen Dorey.

Andrew Pope • The Good Fight
A romantic comedy about a bar bouncer and his stripper girlfriend trying to survive the gentrification of their downtown slum. Andrew worked with advisor Sharon Riis.

Linda Theodosakis • Lucy Caught Fire
A study of a neglected girl who tries to cope with her disabled family through fantasy. Linda worked with story editor John Frizzell; instead of a reading, they did scene work with the actors to develop key characters through improvisation.

The 90's New Wave

by John Egan

A new style of film emerged in the 1990’s which violates the usual construction of a screenplay’s formula.

A new style of film emerged in the 1990’s which violates the usual construction of a screenplay’s formula. These are films with multiple plots in which there is no central lead in the traditional sense. The best recent examples are Secrets and Lies, The English Patient, Pulp Fiction and Kansas City. They are radically different from the formula film.

The traditional Hollywood formula film focuses on the central lead throughout the film. At certain plot points something will happen to the lead, allowing the plot to develop. All other characters are subordinate, existing only to develop the lead character’s relationship to the plot.

In the ’90s New Wave there are no easily recognizable leads and no clearly defined plot in relation to a lead. In Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, we are first introduced to Hortense (Marianne Jean Baptise), a young optician whose mother has just died. We then meet Maurice (Timothy Spall), a middle-aged photographer. His relationships with his wife, secretary and former employer all support his character, a lead in search of a plot until it finally comes to him in the third act. He also has an initially mysterious relationship with his sister Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), who only much later is revealed as the female lead. We still have plot points. Something’s got to happen or the audience won’t stay long. By the 30-minute mark, Secrets and Lies begins to bring the three separate plots and cast slowly together. This is the essence of the ’90s New Wave method: multiple plots and casts fusing in spurts of action that lead to the revelation of the “true plot” in the final act.

The English Patient features two concurrent plots, with the true plot revealed only in the finale. There are four leading roles here, with Ralph Fiennes in two of them. Foremost is the story of the explorer Count Almasy (Fiennes) and his desperate love affair with Katherine (Kristin Scott-Thomas). Equally significant, though less visually magnificent, is the story of the nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche), and the patient (also) by Fiennes. One subplot is the romance between Hana and the Sikh sapper Kip (Naveen Andrews), whose character assists in Hana’s evolution.

If this screenplay were filmed by a major studio and forced to conform to the Hollywood formula, the plot featuring Hana would have been greatly reduced and the Kip character eliminated. The genius of Anthony Minghella’s screenplay is that two equally compelling plots play out simultaneously while the true plot, Almasy’s betrayal of his principles, remains a mystery until the close. The result is an artistically superb and technically perfect piece of filmmaking.

In Pulp Fiction the plot seems to revolve around the two gunmen, Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson). But when Mia (Uma Thurmann) enters, Jules departs until Act III, when he returns and is revealed to be the lead! Mia is a welcome touch who brings some diversity as the film delves deeper into the L.A. underground scene. Beautifully played by Uma Thurmann, it’s a big surprise that she serves only to develop the mood. When Act I ends, Mia disappears.

In Act I we also meet the boxer, Butch (Bruce Willis). His brief encounter with Vincent is a brush stroke from the oil of one plot to another. This is the method of the New Wave: The two or three plots are broad brush strokes at first, separate but merging, to reveal the true plot. In Act II Butch powers another plot and he meets Vincent again with deadly results. The beauty of this construction is that the whole of Act II serves to reveal the ultimate consequences of the true plot – Jules’ moral redemption – which is not unveiled until the final moments of Act III. Continued/last column...

Robert Altman experimented with a similar method in Nashville and Short Cuts, both a series of individual vignettes, some very powerful and compelling. They depict life in the country music scene and Los Angeles, respectively, without a central plot or lead. Kansas City, which may one day be seen as Altman’s greatest accomplishment, features a number of plots, including a robbery and subsequent hostage situation revealed in Act II. At that point there is no further mystery about those plots other than resolution, but the true plot, the social and political corruption of Kansas City, is revealed only in the final scene. After all, the name of the film is Kansas City.

Surely these scripts are more complex than the formula film. To create them, a writer needs to clearly comprehend the fundamental premise that underlies the play and, before anything else, develop a completely defined ending in which the fundamental premise is fully reveled. Every plot must promote the essence of the true plot without revealing it. One way to do it is in historical drama.

For a writer, the beauty of historical drama is that the plot is already structured by a course of events that the audience may already know. For example, almost everyone knows the story of Helen of Troy, a story that comprises multiple made-to-order plots. There is the fabulous love story between the matronly but beautiful Queen Helen and the youthful Prince Paris. A separate plot revolves about the aging, jilted King Menelaus and the alliance of Greek nobles intent on retrieving the stolen queen. The third plot is that of King Priam, his son Hector and the fall of Troy. The author needs to focus only on the fundamental premise while driving all three plots inexorably toward a finale that isn’t the known Fall of Troy, since the true plot must remain secret which is the trick.

Multiple plots are also perfect for stories in which the main character is objectionable and loathsome. No formula film can ever focus primarily on someone like Hitler. A formula film with Hitler as the lead would necessarily promote actions and doctrines repellent to most filmgoers. However, with multiple plots, Hitler would be just one character in the film, with other plots exploring lightness and love interests. In fact, given the abhorrent nature of Hitler’s persona, this might be the only way a writer could sell a screenplay about him. Necessity being the mother of invention, it might be inevitable that more writers turn to multiple plots to generate box-office revenue as the appetite for formulaic movies subsides.

Multiple plots allow the writer to easily and effectively tell the story in a non-linear manner, as The English Patient and Pulp Fiction do. There’s an adage that says, “When you have to resort to flashbacks, your film is in trouble.” The ’90s New Wave method grants the writer the creative latitude to express ideas that normally could not be developed in a linear story without flashbacks. For example, a film titled Spanish Armada would have a fabulous cast perfect for multiple plot layers. The jilted King of Spain and the Spanish decision to declare war would be one plot and the English sea captains Drake and Hawkins, who occasionally dally with Elizabeth I of England, would be another. Multiple plots would also allow the writer to tell the story of Elizabeth’s judicial murder of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, which happened one year before the Armada in 1587. The film could begin with Mary’s entrapment and subsequent beheading. Elizabeth’s trauma would be the true plot, with the ships, royal diplomacy and battles establishing the mood.

Films like The English Patient and Pulp Fiction are unlike anything Hollywood has ever done before and have proved that a sophisticated audience exists for such films. The multiple plot structure is simply a new way to tell stories on film, possessing both critical and commercial appeal, which is, after all, the bottom line. Eventually, the public will grow tired of films structured around explosions. When they do – and that process has already begun, a very hip 21st century public will demand more of the new wave and gladly pay to see the results.

Extract reprinted from Script Vol. 3 No. 6