Jason Stringer

“That’s pretty good, actually. Wouldn’t change much about it,” my wife casually informs me, flopping the flimsy 7-page screenplay onto the table in front of me. I’m hunched over the laptop again, my face illuminated in blue light from the screen.

She turns her back to me and heads to the nearby kitchen counter to whip up a fresh coffee. The kettle has just boiled.

This is very unlike my darling wife. ‘Pretty good’? ‘Well done’? Who is this person and what has she done with my wife? She usually tears out my soul, hands my writing back to me laughing whilst saying ‘Nice try, baby…’

I grab the screenplay and flick through the pages. Yep. I gave her the right one. This one in particular is a unique idea I’ve had for a while, that I’ve finally been able to put on paper. I’m hoping to throw it in the mix for production funding this month.

“You… liked it?” I ask, fishing for the truth.

“Yeah, loved it. One of your better ones.”

I’m a deer in headlights. The sound of her spoon clapping the side of her mug as she stirs her drink fills the silence between us. Better challenge her, I decide.

“Okay, so, when the dog in the park–”

She interrupts, “I laughed! It actually made me giggle out loud. That bit was clever!”

Laughed? Clever? OK what the fuck is going on!?

She takes a sensual sip of her coffee (she’s really gorgeous. Anything she does is sensual to me…). I’m feeling intimidated despite the compliments. I feel like I’m being tested.

“Okay, well, I was thinking about one moment,” I begin, hoping to extract some constructive feedback, “where David (the main character) goes to the chemist…”

“Chemist?”

“Yeah, to buy the drugs, remember?”

She takes another sip instead of answering. I leaf through the screenplay again to absolutely make sure I printed the right one. Everything seems in order. I even find the scene in question.

“Here, page three.”

She moseys over and takes a look over my shoulder. Her wedding ring taps the side of the mug.

“Oh wow, I never read that page.”

What?!

“How do you skip an entire page?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t remember this chemist stuff, he went straight from his home to the job, and then the park.”

She whips the screenplay out of my hands and proceeds to re-read from page one.

I return to faceboo… erm, production budgets and video editing. The sound of her leafing through the pages becomes more violent and swift. She finishes, slaps the screenplay on my keyboard hard and announces:

“That’s fucked!” She returns to the kitchen to rinse her now-empty coffee mug. I’m a deer in headlights again.

“Um, fucked?”

“Yeah! That scene. That page. It ruins the whole thing.”

“Ruins it? But…”

“When I read it the first time and I accidentally skipped that page, okay, but it worked a lot better without it.”

Bemused, I again leaf to page three and notice the scene in question pretty much dominates the entire page.

“Um, so you’re saying we don’t need to go to the chemist in any way? We can skip it? But, I liked that scene…”

She lowers her brow at me and darts that look at me. That look that says: You already know the answer.

And that, my friends, is how my most brutal critic, my darling wife, saved my 7-page short screenplay from being overly lengthy fluff and culled it to a tidy 5 pages. Because she accidentally forgot to read an entire page. It was meant to be. I now have a screenplay I’m very happy with, primed for a funding application.

Fate has a funny way of ironing things out.