have to wait and wait and maybe call in another writer to finish his script or rewrite the end. The fact that he did not object to someone putting the tail on his script was why he was still working. The truth was that he was content for someone else to finish his stories.
‘So what do you want, Case?’ one of his tutors at the Binger had asked irritably a few months before in a coffee shop in Amsterdam, halfway through a three-month grant stay where he had been trying yet again to resolve the end of a script. ‘You want to just go on and on and what? Bore the audience to death?’ One woman in a session had said outright that maybe his inability to finish – to close – was tied up with his unresolved sexuality. He grimaced at the obvious circumlocution for ‘his repressed homosexuality’. Well, it was Amsterdam where window-peeping was a tourist industry and you ordered grass off a menu after discussing it with the waiter. There had been a lot of talk about performance as exhibitionism and audience voyeurism. He had kept silent because, for him, any audience that would see the movie arising from his script was irrelevant. He did not think about other people when he wrote. For him writing was an articulation of his observations, and an attempt to lay them out in a way that would make some sense of the world. The reason he had never produced a play that satisfied him, despite the credits to his name, might be the same reason he had never found an ending that felt right.
There was an announcement and he freeze-framed to listen, but could not tell whether the disembodied announcement was in English or Greek or Esperanto, much less whether the speaker was male or female. Fortunately, he could see the departure boards from where he was sitting, and make out the destinations and gate numbers if he squinted. He was searching for the Aegean Airlines flight when a tall woman stopped in front of him, blocking his view.
She was wearing a perfectly fitted, perfectly pressed, parchment-coloured sleeveless suit and a panama hat of the sort that he associated with Casablanca, tilted very slightly over one eye. Her long, thin, bare arms hung loosely by her side, the slender fingers slightly furled. She wore no varnish on her short, square-cut nails, and she was carrying nothing. That struck him as unusual, because you never saw a woman without a bag of some kind, especially now bags were as big a status symbol as cars, some of them costing almost as much. The fabric of the woman’s suit was so fine and smooth you could tell she did not have so much as a coin in a pocket. Was it possible she was carrying no more than her boarding pass and passport? She didn’t even have a book. Could anyone travel that light?
He was interested in how, by simply standing so long with her back to him, she was building dramatic tension in him. It was not so much that he felt curiosity about her face, but the relaxed fluidity of her waiting roused his interest, for she would not stand so long merely to read something that was already there. Like him, she must be waiting for her gate number to be announced. But people did not normally wait without any sign of impatience. She did not fidget or adjust her clothes or shift her weight from one slender, booted foot to the other, nor did she look away from the board. Case had never seen anyone wait so compellingly. How could anyone surrender with such grace to the necessity of waiting?
Woman in perfectly white silk suit and panama hat stands relaxed with her back to the camera as she studies departure boards. Camera watches her from point of view of man seated. She stands unmoving.
Adequate lines, but how to recast them so that they would express the profound patience evoked by her stillness? Directions should evoke mood without wasting a word in explaining it. No adjectives. A film script like Taxi Driver was the perfect example of dynamic poetry – how a violent, dark, gritty movie could be expressed so lyrically as a script! He had no desire to write that sort of film, but he would have liked his scripts to have the spare beauty that arose from real precision.