Previously, on "Prison Planet" posted by kza

This is my first post on The Screenplay, and I’m not sure where to start. So I’m going to start everywhere at once, and just throw this shit at the wall and see what sticks.

It looks like we’ll be designing the Prison Planet from the ground up, in order to figure out what kind of world we’re dealing with, and what kind of characters and conflicts would emerge from this setting. I’m not against that; on the contrary, in general it’s a good idea. However, I think the ultimate point in doing so should be in discovering a character (ideally, the protagonist) who both is unique by nature and by the conflict that impinges on him – a character that couldn’t exist without the Prison Planet. Also, just to make things more difficult, the character’s unique nature and the conflict should be intertwined, if not the same.

To not have this goal, to simply build the Prison Planet for the sake of itself… To me, it’s like in one of my writing classes when I was at school, when the class built a character from the ground up. Give her a name! What does she do? What does she look like? Where does she live? Etc. Not that these aren’t good questions, but the end result was a Frankenstein’s monster, with no real obvious use. And it’s not that there weren’t any conflicts in the character – I’m sure some were suggested – but they didn’t seem like they were connected to anything in the character. So that’s my big fear with that strategy – that we end up with this thing that’s somewhat interesting in and of itself, but with no real narrative use.

I guess what I’m saying, at risk of looking like some hack screenwriting book author, it’s all about Character + Conflict. If the Prison Planet can give us that (and hopefully, one that couldn’t exist without the Prison Planet), awesome; otherwise, I’m content to start elsewhere. But of course, we won’t know until we try.

So the other thing I was thinking: Prison Planet as metaphor. How can one’s life be a prison planet? One’s city? One’s mind? One’s social world? I’m not arguing that this is a better place to start than a literal Prison Planet; in fact, it seems as hackneyed, if not moreso. But I remember when Burley first mentioned the Prison Planet idea, and my first response (because I like novelty and mash-ups and contrasts in general) is to combine it with something else, and the first thing that popped into my head was Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. But I don’t mean that book literally (I’ve never read it), but that as a symbol of a kind of “literariness” that might contrast nicely with the SF pulpiness of a Prison Planet. So one way to incorporate that is to think of it as a metaphor.

Okay, so for my first screenplay post, I shit on everything without offering anything constructive. Great. For my next post, I’ll either contribute directly to the idea of a Prison Planet, or I’ll make the Space Needle disappear. Whichever’s easier.

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