A Farewell to Legs: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,13

for a favor,” said Anne.

“That’s my going rate,” I said. “Tell me what you know.”

Chapter

Eight

It turned out the six-letter word for “dummies”—the crossword puzzle item that had so stymied me—was “dodoes.” That crazy, whimsical New York Times.

I spent the rest of that morning on the two phone calls for the Star-Ledger story and trying to absorb my other two current assignments. For one, I was being asked to find out who killed a relatively major political figure, and write about it because I knew him and his now-widow in high school. I had just about no experience doing such things, but was being paid $10,000 for my on-the-job training.

On the other hand, I had plenty of experience in finding out which little kid has been mischievous, because I have been a parent for twelve years. So discovering who had chucked the stink bombs into various rooms in the Buzbee School was considerably better suited to my talents. Of course, for this I was being paid nothing. The fact that I’d been asked to do it at all (or that anyone had been asked) was the hardest part to believe.

I decided to start on the paying job first, and put in a call to my friend Mitch Davis, who works for USA Today in the Washington, D.C. area. But Mitch was out, so I settled for his voice mail, and sat down to ponder.

Pondering is what I’m best at in the morning. Before two in the afternoon, I’m useless as a writer unless there’s a deadline to meet. So I thought, and I put music on (since I’m not allowed to play what I like while the kids are home), and I had a Healthy Choice frozen lunch while watching a rerun of Hill Street Blues on Bravo. Then, I reread the scene I’d written yesterday on my latest screenplay.

Screenwriting isn’t the kind of thing you do because you want to—it’s the kind of thing you do because if you don’t, the story will leak out through your ears. I’ve been writing screenplays for upwards of 20 years in the increasingly vain hope that some maniac producer will read one, decide I’m worth throwing some money at, and eventually make a movie. So far, I’ve been given money exactly three times for options—a kind of rental agreement producers use to keep you from selling your script to someone else for a year or so—and come close to snagging a couple of other options. I’ve made so much money screenwriting that we were actually able to send Ethan to a day camp for kids with neurological problems last summer. Prorated over time, my screen-writing wages are just a couple of cents an hour below what slaves generally get.

What all this means is: don’t expect rationality when discussing the “art” of writing for the movies. It comes from a deep, abiding love for the form that began roughly at age three, when my parents took me to see Pinocchio, and was cemented into place when I realized someone actually wrote this stuff, around the time I first saw North by Northwest. Cary Grant could be charming as all get-out, but without Ernest Lehman to tell him what to say, he’d never have made it out of that auction in Chicago alive. If you haven’t seen it, go rent the DVD. NOW!

I read over the previous day’s work, and it was actually better than I’d expected. After the Madlyn Beckwirth mess, I’d tossed the romantic comedy I’d been laboring with, and started a murder mystery. That was easier, since the true story was so bizarre, I only had to change some details and move a few characters around to avoid being sued. The writing was going well.

Today’s task involved a tricky scene that included a lot of exposition. The problem with exposition, or plot points, in a script is that the last thing you want an audience to feel is that they’re being told, and not shown, a story. You don’t want your characters explaining everything in dialogue. The best way to convey the story point is in a visual, but that’s not always possible. So, you have to hide your exposition in jokes or create a diversion, a task for the characters to perform while they’re talking. An interesting setting or a subplot for the scene can disguise exposition, too, but it all has to be worked out ahead of time. And in this case, I was having trouble coming up with the